Blog Comments & Posts

Are you sure there's a 3-day wait with Google Insights? I find it's usually 1 or 2. EG I checked just now (Thursday) and it's showing data for Tuesday (lloking at worldwide search for SEOMOZ, last 7 days).

Part of the issue is surely down to the type of client and the stage you're at. The reports you describe as good are the sort that work if you have an ongoing relationship with a convinced client who can get things done internally at their organisation - and who has bought in to the programme of work you've suggested.

Part of the problem as an agency or a consultant is how you get to that point (and it may be impossible - not everyone who hires SEO advice can actually get their internal development team to do stuff ...). One of the ways is to convince internal stakeholders of the scale of the problem. I agree that board members and marketing heads don't want a 100-page report. But there are people internally in organisations who will want to know the scale of the problem, who will want to understand the detail etc. You'll probably reply that there are better ways to convince them then a 100-page report (and to an extent I'd agree - workshops etc probably are better). But sometimes you do need a document that details everything that needs doing.

I think we can all agree that bad reports are bad reports. If they don't lead to action, aren't read, don't make clear the next steps and don't convince then they are bad reports.

But I'm not sure that that means that all big reports are bad reports.

Interesting points though - and I'd definitely agree that large reports for large reports' sake is a problem in the SEO industry.

Hi, Rand. Did you mean to say "I would strongly get behind Stephan's statement that what the toolbar server reports is what Google uses internally"? Is there a "not" missing? Stephan had said: "It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm."

Help me out some more. I did reread it 100 times (and did the quiz again just to make sure) ...

The question is to select the answer that is NOT accurate. One of the options is "Since 2000, searches in the United States have (on average) increasingly contained more words per query."

This is accurate, isn't it? So it can't be the right answer (ie the right answer is supposed to be a wrong statement). Feel free to show me where I'm missing the point - I just need it in some more detail ...

the page title should preferably employ the keyword term/phrase as the first word(s). In our correlation data studies, the following graph emerged ... Clearly, using the keyword term/phrase as the very first words in the page title has the highest correlation with high rankings,

Would this post's correlation with rankings be clearer if you could somehow account for where in the title the keyword was for a given ranking. If you see what I mean.

"Adding internal links from many important pages does provide ranking benefit, but it appears not to matter whether those links contain optimized anchor text after the first few (or few dozen, depending on site size)."

When working on sites with auto-generated titles, I usually try to get the homepage done differently with a call to action as you say.

It's just I noticed, for instant, that Arsenal.com stopped ranking 1st for arsenal a few months ago. They always play around with their home page title - it's currently " Paddy Power: Celtic v Arsenal -Evens Arsenal Win || Arsenal.com" for instance. Then again, they do keep putting a splash page up on a different URL so maybe that was why.

So it seems obvious to me that:

Keyword | Site | Call to action

would have better clickthroughs.

But could it be in danger of losing out to:

Keyword | Some other site

when it comes to rankings (due to some dilution effect)? We all know position affects clickthrough as well...

With the title tag, what effect does adding other words to it have? For instance, if in the example here it was 'Chocolate Donuts | Mary's Bakery | Get 10% off all through August'. Could adding words like this harm the position in the results (I imagine it would increase clickthroughs...)?

Have you tried typing 'michael jackson is' into google? Apparently the Google Autosuggest thinks he is dead, dying, ill, and back. Not to mention also being Latoya.

I tried this with a couple of other UK figures, like our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (screenshots here). Apparently he is sh*t, an idiot, useless, incompetent and a pr*ck according to Google Autosuggest.

What's more, Prince Charles is the antichrist apparently.

I'm sure these are all generated algorithmically. But don't you think this needs some looking at?!?

This made me laugh as I've just done a round up of companies who forbid you from linking to their websites in their terms & condtions. I have no idea why - the lawyers have gone mad. But someone should tell the SEO teams at apple, royal mail, vodafone etc ...:

"Chasing DoFollow Blogs ... I have yet to see competitive rankings earned from a dofollow blog link strategy"

Do you think this differs depending on the keyword? If I was pursuing car insurance, p0rn or any of the other idiotic keywords left on my blog, then I'd agree. But if you're after ranking for fairly niche keywords, then a dose of dofollow comment links from relevant pages are better than nothing, surely. Well, they're probably obviously better than nothing! But probably worth the effort of pursuing, no?

Do you think you can use this to fix the problem of comment pagination and duplicate content in wordpress?

When a posts' comments are split across several pages and URLs, the post at the top is the same on each URL but the comments are different. Although there is also a URL version - the /comment-page-1/ one - that is identical to the permalink.

On the subject of football teams and SEO, I noticed that man utd have disappeared from the google.co.uk results when you tick 'pages from the uk'. Google must be taken the club's american ownership seriously ...: